Where does a lay preacher even begin? In A Lay Preacher’s Guide: How to Craft a Faithful Sermon, Professor Karoline Lewis offers both encouragement and structure to lead you forward.
A faithful lay preacher does:
- Trust that you have something to say that the congregation needs to hear.
“We trust our voice, because God does,” writes Lewis. You are called to this sacred task! But of course building trust takes time, especially with ourselves. You may find yourself exploring more your own identity as a person of faith, a child of God, while you prepare to speak the Word to others. Trusting takes practice.
- Practice—out loud—in order to hone your craft.
Overcoming resistance or disbelief that God is really calling you to preach will take repeatedly showing yourself (not to mention others) that you can learn and grow into the role. A preacher has to really lean into this calling, and what it requires of us: practicing the craft. Is there a sense that you are going to “arrive” someday? No, there isn’t. Each time spent with each Scripture text shapes how you attend to the text. And because of what is going on in our lives, we attend to it in a different way.
Make sermon preparation time a nonnegotiable “appointment with God” on your calendar. It is a time for holy conversation, for listening to what God has to say to you.
- Preach with your entire body.
We communicate with our bodies all the time. How do we take that understanding of what body language and tone do, into the pulpit? A sermon is not a sermon until it is “performed.” The craft of developing a preaching persona—that is not totally different from your normal way of being—will take observation and soliciting feedback from others.
A faithful sermon is:
- Biblical
Karoline outlines an 8 step process for crafting a faithful sermon in her book, but on the podcast episode, she calls out one important step: Wait to consult the experts. Reading commentaries too early in your process creates too much chatter, before you’ve listened closely for what this text might mean particularly for your congregation. The commentaries don’t know your context—what’s on their hearts and minds—but you do.
- An encounter with God
Listen deeply for what God is saying to you in the text. Dive down into it: What puzzles you? What are you curious about? What does the text do to you, when you read it? A sermon is not “about” God. It’s an experience, an encounter with God. The preacher needs to encounter God in the text first, before she can lead others to such an experience. Furthermore, the places the text may come most alive could be in nature. One of Karoline’s strategies for getting unstuck on a sermon is to take the Scripture you are working with out into the world somewhere to read it.
- Autobiographical
But how is that done well? Nadia Bolz-Weber says we should “preach from our scars, not our wounds.” How do we do that? The rhetorical triangle can help with this: You, the preacher > the text > the congregation. The sermons that are cringe-worthy are only between you and the text, or just you. Remember this is to be a three-way conversation.
Consider Mary Magdalene’s first proclamation of the Word: “I have seen the Lord.” It’s a personal message, from her own faithful experience, but it’s also an invitation to “Come and see.” There needs to be enough of you in the sermon, for them to believe you that this matters—that you have encountered God and they can too. The first sermon could have been “He is risen,” but it’s not. It is “I have seen the Lord.” It goes back to the incarnation, that the Word is embodied, in Jesus and in you, when you bear witness.
For more on this volume in the Working Preacher Books series, A Lay Preacher’s Guide: How to Craft a Faithful Sermon, listen to a podcast episode or watch it on YouTube. On the podcast, Karoline Lewis discusses the book with Rolf Jacobson and Amy Butler, and the important role that lay preachers play in today’s church.